posted by Sierra Marquina -

4 months ago

It’s been eight years since we’ve heard new music from Dashboard Confessional — aka cue the emo revival! Dashboard Confessional made their comeback known at iHeartRadio’s ALTer EGO 2018 at The Forum in Los Angeles on Friday, January 19, performing for the first time new track “Heart Beat Here,” the latest to be released off their forthcoming LP, Crooked Shadows.

"Heart Beat Here,” which dropped just one day before they hit the stage, makes for the perfect return for frontman Chris Carrabba, who offered a seriously powerful vocal over a strong acoustic strum during ALTer EGO. Chris also enlisted the help of the crowd, turning on mics to record an acoustic with them singing the chorus.

The band also performed “Vindicated,” “Hands Down” and politically charged lead single “We Fight" — which Chris didn't hold back on.

“It’s a weird thing when you write a song; you think you know what it’s about, but you don’t [really] until some months later sometimes. So, I thought for sure it was just about how I found a place in the world, which was worth fighting for, which was the music scene that I come from. I wasn’t cool in school. I didn’t fit in. I found this music scene and it fostered this community and it fostered the people in it. You could be black or white, you could be straight or gay, you could be a man or a woman,” Chris previously told Beats 1 of the rally track. “Everybody was equal and we were equally protected but we were equally encouraged to do something that challenged the status quo. But then the political climate has changed in such a way that, almost days after writing that song, America started to feel really regressive somehow. And all these great strides we made during the last administration had been threatened to be undone, and I realized that people have beliefs worth protecting, worth standing up for and I found a residence in that.”

“It’s a difficult thing to explain,” Chris said of the decision to come out with new music now during an interview with The Woody Showprior to hitting the stage. “It’s an impulse you can’t ignore. You can manufacture it and that’s dangerous territory and that’s why we waited so long because I didn’t want it to be kind of a reflection of a Dashboard song. We wanted it to be something strong and pure and real.”